When Should Survey Reminders be Sent Out? An Investigation Into Surveys Analyzing High Schoolers

Abstract

In the modern day, surveys often have very low response rates. This reveals a need for greater understanding of survey research, in order to enable researchers to achieve high response rates. One relevant facet of survey research is reminder timings, or the amount of time between the survey invitation and the reminder. In this study, the researcher investigated a potential reminder timing, analyzing surveys on high school students to discover the day that people stop responding to surveys. The researcher found that in their dataset, people stop responding to surveys after an average of 3 days of the survey being active. This finding may be relevant to informing survey reminder timings in the future, as effective reminders may be placed at the point people stop responding to surveys. There may be more optimal reminder timings, however. More investigation must be done into the ideal point for survey reminders to generate more solid conclusions.